‘As an example,’ says Mrs Clark, ‘whilst I was at Rudloe, I had Heinkel. He was called Heinkel,’ she explains, ‘because all the other dogs on the camp were called Spitfire, Bow – all English planes. I was originally going to get a Dachshund. I had to wait for it because it was coming from a litter. And we decided if it was going to be a German sausage dog, it would have a German name. But the litter turned out to be all bitches, which you couldn’t have on a camp. So the dog-breeding woman said to me, “I have a very nice corgi puppy, I’ll send it down to Bath on the train.”
‘We went in to get it off the train,’ continues Mrs Clark, ‘and it looked like a drowned pig – dark wet fur, it had obviously wet itself in its cardboard box. It was the most miserable looking, unattractive object you have ever seen. I said to the girls, “No way, I can’t have it, it’s going back.” The next train wasn’t for an hour, and the weather was lovely. I had the roof down on the car. I left the dog in its cardboard box with the lid open, on the back seat. Off we went to do some shopping. When we came back, he had somehow managed to get out of the box and had got at a packet of Smiths potato crisps and he was sitting there surrounded by crumbs and looking up at me as if to say, “I’ve enjoyed myself. Had lunch.” I fell in love with him.’
Mrs Clark, it seems, was not alone. When she took the adorable scrap back to camp, even senior figures such as Wing Commander Rudd were bowled over. Others, however, were sterner.
‘This administrative woman officer arrived on the camp a bit later,’ says Mrs Clark, ‘and declared that we could not have dogs running about. I was told to get rid of him.’
She said, ‘That’s not fair, there are other dogs on the camp – the group captain has got a dog.’
The woman officer said, ‘The group captain is entitled to have what he wants.’
This was unfair, thought Mrs Clark. She said, ‘I’ll go and see him.’
The group captain told her, ‘I suppose there’s a reason. Possibly,’ he added, ‘my dog is better behaved than your dog.’
She replied, ‘No dog is better behaved than mine and I can prove it to you if you like.’
So they had a competition: which dog was more obedient? The trial involved a thrown ball to be fetched, and the requirement for each dog to hold back until told otherwise. The group captain’s dog folded, however. Heinkel had had a secret advantage: he had been trained with a toy rabbit. The group captain conceded defeat and had a word with the strict female regulation officer. Heinkel stayed put.
As a postscript, Mrs Clark adds, ‘Years after, on Victoria station, people would come up and say, “That’s Heinkel isn’t it?” They didn’t remember me – but they did remember the dog!’
Among the Fighter Command stations up and down the country, RAF Watnall, which became the operational headquarters of No. 12 Group in Nottinghamshire, was less popular among some WAAFs; the Midlands countryside was flatter, the nightlife less exotic. Some women made their own entertainment, as Gladys Eva, later promoted to flight corporal, discovered one day: ‘You had to see that all the girls had made their beds properly and were dressed properly. Get them into line to march them on. But one day when I came on duty, two women were missing. I said: “Where’s so and so and so and so?”’
‘Oh,’ she was told, ‘They’re not here. They were caught in bed together last night.’
‘Whatever for?’ she said.
‘The whole place erupted. The girls were absolutely hysterical. I had no idea at all what a lesbian was. But most of them had worked in an office and had seen … things that I hadn’t. Soon I knew EVERYTHING. Oh dear!’
Working with the WAAFs also brought moments of intense professional pride; this was especially true for Eileen Younghusband, who found herself being promoted and becoming a commissioned officer. At a time when young women had practically no voice at all in any sort of workplace, this was a remarkable development, and initially there were a few awkward matters to negotiate.
‘There was one brilliant moment,’ she recalls of the time when her commission came through. ‘It was on the train. Because as a commissioned officer, you were entitled to go and sit in first class.’ There was a sense of initial discomfort too. Wearing the very smart new blue officer’s uniform, she felt a spasm of what might be termed imposter anxiety: would male officers remonstrate with her for having the brass neck and audacity to claim privileges that she perceived not to be rightfully hers? But they did not.
Then there were other things to get used to. ‘Like when a male sergeant saluted me one day when I was going on duty, about a week after I had been commissioned – well, he saluted me and I had to salute him,’ says Mrs Younghusband. ‘I had to acknowledge it. But I did think for a moment, what do I … I was twenty. Neither my brother nor my father nor (later) my son ever knew about the work that I was doing.’ She had, of course, signed the Official Secrets Act. ‘But my parents knew I had been commissioned. They were proud.’
Patricia Clark also found herself being elevated to the level of officer; like Eileen Younghusband, she was tremendously young. ‘I was commissioned very quickly. I was lucky. We were more or less the first girls in there. So when the men left – and they needed people quickly – they had to promote quickly. I don’t think I should have been promoted at all. I suppose I did the job adequately because otherwise I wouldn’t have been promoted again – I must have been able to do it. But there I was, twenty years old, giving people orders who were perhaps thirty or forty, it didn’t seem right. Didn’t do it round the camp, only on duty. But when some middle-aged man would go by and salute me, I would feel slightly odd … and I never got to grips with what stripes meant what. The war made an enormous difference to the whole class system. You realised that there was an acceptable other half.’
But Mrs Clark was to find that some aspects of the officer – and class – system were very rigid. One night in Bath, on leave from Rudloe, she had met a young man called Mel.
‘Not long after I had arrived at Rudloe, and I had the car, there was a dance at the NAAFI on the camp. All the men were at the bar and all the women were down the far end of the room. When the music started, the men came down, picked a girl, took them on to the dance floor.
‘I thought, whatever have I come to? When I’d been out with my mother’s friends’ sons, they would call with a camellia or whatever, and you were then escorted there and back. So I was standing in the NAAFI hut talking to this girl – one of my friends, very pretty, blonde, lovely long legs. And this chap comes down and his intention is to ask her to dance. But a second chap appears at the side of her and beats him to it. So the first chap, rather than having to look stupid and walk back up to the bar, taps me on the shoulder and says: “Would you like to dance?”
‘I didn’t know what I was going to do. I didn’t want to be left standing there, so I said yes. He took me on the floor – he was a super dancer, and great fun. He was,’ Mrs Clark adds, sotto voce, ‘lower class.
‘But it was such fun, I thoroughly enjoyed myself.’
It was very hot in the NAAFI, and her companion asked if she would like to come outside for some fresh air. Once they were outside, he said, ‘Do you smoke?’
‘No,’ she replied.
So he said: ‘Would you mind if I smoke?’ He lit a Woodbine, held out the match and said, ‘Blow it out.’
‘Can’t you?’ she answered.
‘No, no,’ he said, ‘I want you to do it.’
So she blew out the match, and was thus ensnared in his cunning trap. ‘Well, you know that’s a forfeit,’ he said.
‘What do you mean?’ she asked.
He answered, ‘If you blow out a match like that, you have to give a person a kiss.’
‘Innocently, I thought, oh, I didn’t know that. So … I kissed him. Dear oh dear.’ At this, Mrs Clark dissolves into loud laughter. ‘But of course,’ she continues, ‘he realised after a few minutes what he had got: something out of his normal … ken. So there we were, discovering how t
he other half worked.’ By which she means the British class system.
‘Anyway, Audrey, another girl, had also got picked up by one of these airmen, whom she had had great fun with. Well, that night when we got back to our billet, we were up till about two in the morning discussing it. Did we dare see them again? We knew our parents would never allow it.’
This was an age in which – for the smarter sort of girl – the considerations of family weighed heavily. Balanced against this was a certain ignorance about what men – especially ‘lower class’ men – might get up to. ‘And in the end,’ she says, ‘we decided that provided we stayed together, and provided we had my car, if anything untoward happened, we could make a dash for the car and drive to safety. When I told Mel all of this later on, he had hysterics. “What in God’s name did you think we were going to do to you?” he said. We didn’t know! We only knew that we weren’t supposed to be mixing with them. Well, if you weren’t supposed to be mixing, why not? It was something ominous, obviously, or we would have been allowed to.’
It now sounds less like class, and more like caste. Mrs Clark finds it extraordinary that this was only seventy-five years ago. ‘Anyway, that following evening, we stuck as a foursome. We agreed: that way it would be safe. We went to a dance, had a lovely time, thoroughly enjoyed ourselves. And Mel said, “Before we go back, what about some fish and chips?” So we thought, sounds quite nice. We stop outside a caravan-looking thing where they’re serving fish and chips in newspaper. Handed us this paper. I said: “Don’t they give you a knife and fork?” “No – you just eat it.” It was a complete eye-opener. I think then men were seeing how much further they would go, in the sense of getting a giggle out of it.’
In a sense, this was Pygmalion in reverse: the elegant ladies gradually being indoctrinated into the ways of the lower orders. ‘The men took us to a pub,’ says Mrs Clark, laughing, ‘and they said: “What would you like to drink?” Well, neither myself nor Audrey had really drunk, other than wine at dinners. They were drinking beers. One of them said, “What about a lager and lime? That’s not too alcoholic.” So we had lager and lime.’
A little later, when Patricia went on leave, her father asked what she had been doing. ‘I told him I went to the pub and had a lager and lime and it was absolutely lovely. My father said: “You had WHAT?” He was absolutely appalled.’
Quite apart from the horror of parents, there was another fearsome obstacle in the way of this wartime romance: Patricia Clark was a commissioned officer and Mel was not. Such things not only mattered enormously, but were also strictly policed.
‘Although in general terms nobody supervised our off time at all, the only thing I was never allowed to do was go out with Mel,’ says Mrs Clark, shaking her head. ‘Officers may not mix with other ranks. We weren’t allowed out together. So what I used to do was this: I used to get into my civilian clothes, put my greatcoat and my hat on, go through the Guard Room, take my salute, then go down into Bath, into the ladies’ room, off with the coat and hat and once more a civilian for the rest of the evening. And then put it all back on again to go back into camp. I wouldn’t have been allowed to go out with him. But it made it more exciting, more dangerous. If spotted, you would have been on a charge. You could have been decommissioned.’
As was so frequently the way with wartime love, the two of them were wrenched apart by duty; Mel was posted elsewhere in the world. Patricia Clark continued to write him letters. But in time, both she and he found other people. They were not to be reunited until the 1970s, and even then there was an element of chance: a bunch of mixed family holidays in Switzerland. It was only after all those years that they realised just how deeply they loved one another. The extraordinary upshot was that, after some thirty-five years, Patricia and Mel left their spouses and finally got together. And they stayed together until the end. Mel died in 2012.
Elsewhere, crews were being refreshed and replenished. At RAF Hornchurch, an American pilot – flying for the RAF, since the USA was not to enter the war until December 1941 – gained his first glimpse of intense Englishness as soon as he arrived. Arthur Donahue went straight to the officers’ mess and managed to put his name down for a room with a fireplace. That misty November of 1940, he recalled his first day flying with a Spitfire squadron.
The day begins with my elderly batman waking me up by coming into my room at about 6.30am to get my uniform, shoes and flying boots, I sink back to sleep again to be wakened by his voice saying ‘it’s 7.30am now sir.’ I wash, shave and dress. Dressed, I walk down the hallway to the large dining hall where other pilots of the squadrons are drifting in, clomping with their big boots, and rubbing their eyes sleepily.
Copies of all the morning London papers are laid out on a table in one corner of the hall: some of us pick up copies to read while we’re eating breakfast. Breakfast consists as usual of cereal, bacon and eggs, toast, marmalade and tea …
Then it was time for the ‘roar of the Spitfire’s Rolls Royce engine at full throttle’.1
In other words, the measured insouciance of the English pilots was more than matched by those who joined them; this was true both of the Americans and of the courageous Poles and Canadians whose squadrons were proving equally invaluable.
Meanwhile, on another day that same month at RAF Hornchurch, pilot Edward Wells was taken aback, while on patrol in the skies, to come face to face with a formation of biplanes that were flying over Southend-on-Sea. They were Corpo Aereo Italiano – planes belonging to Mussolini’s Italian air force. Italy had entered the war in June and Mussolini had provided some fighters more as a gesture of goodwill towards Hitler than as the essential components of some diabolical plan. ‘I could not recognise them, but I assumed them to be a friendly training flight, which seemed to have lost its way, and strayed into a highly operational area,’ recalled Wells. ‘Almost at once, two or three of them opened fire on me, at what seemed extreme range. I found this behaviour to be unacceptable, irritating and even slightly dangerous.’
Wells makes it sound as though he was a motorist being cut up by an exasperating road-hog. ‘I turned on the nearest biplane and gave him a good burst of 3-4 seconds,’ he continues. ‘He immediately disappeared into cloud and was not seen again. I repeated this performance with three more different aircraft, by which time I had exhausted all my ammunition.’ Even after that, Wells had not been able to make a positive identification of his attackers. It was only when he got back to base and was able to consult an identification chart that he was sure who he had been up against. ‘I claimed only one damaged, as I had seen some parts fly off one of the targets, before he disappeared into cloud. I now believe that all four of them must have fallen into the sea … as far as I know, the Italian Air Force never came to England again!’2
The Battle of Britain itself had already become – in one sense – a cult that attracted celebrity attention. Pilots at the Biggin Hill station in Kent found that film stars were seeking them out. There was David Niven, who had already tried to enlist to fly but was turned down; there was Laurence Olivier, then at the height of his Hollywood powers having starred in Wuthering Heights (1939) and Hitchcock’s Rebecca (1940). Olivier paid a visit, together with his even more famous wife Vivien Leigh (Gone with the Wind, in which she starred, had opened in 1939 and was still running in many cinemas). On top of this came attention from fine theatrical stalwarts like Ralph Richardson and Roger Livesey. Such attention was borne of fascination, and also appeared to have a distinctly social dimension, the upper-middle-class pilots mingling quite easily with the sophisticated actors. And unusually, the pilots having the greater glamour.
As 1940 drew towards its close, still the skies were filled with threat. There had been daytime raids, which the squadrons of 11, 12 and 10 Group had attempted to fight off; bombs had been dropped on Norfolk coastal towns, causing Anderson shelters to be lifted into the air, twisting as they did so; then heavy raids on towns in the southwest, again resulting in death and damage, and rende
ring hundreds of people homeless. The cold determination of the Luftwaffe was unabated. At 11 Group, where Leigh-Mallory and Squadron Leader Douglas Bader had been drilling pilots, finessing big wing formations, there was a sense at one point that, as Bader’s biographer puts it, ‘the RAF was nearly helpless. The fighters went up and roamed and now and then they caught a bomber but not often, and the news reports spoke more confidently than the men behind them.’3
The size of wings made no difference at night; but nor was the ability of the bombers to get through in any way the responsibility of those working in the Operations and Filter Rooms at Bentley Priory. Even by December 1940, the available technology was still primitive; they knew that the bombers were coming in – they would have known that without radar – but night bombers were sleek against the sky and even if multiple squadrons of fighter pilots had been patrolling the Kent and Essex coast for as many hours as their fuel would allow, the early RDF would still not have been able to give them an exact fix. Very few German planes, therefore, were brought down at night; Fighter Command managed just four throughout the month of December 1940.
‘A glance at the map of England, Scotland and Northern Ireland must show that we cannot be expected to cope with the numbers of night-bombers that the enemy can put up against us with only six squadrons,’ wrote Air Chief Marshal Sholto Douglas in a secret and anguished memo to Air Chief Marshal Sir Charles Portal on 9 December 1940. ‘The initiative lies with the enemy. He chooses his target and the direction of the attack and he can and does vary the latter in the same night. We may have to take on a concentration of three hundred bombers on Newcastle one night and on Plymouth the next, or 150 on both on the same night. We must, of course, be as flexible as possible and be prepared to move night fighters from one sector to another. I have already in fact issued orders to this effect, but there are definite limits to the extent to which this can be done if the fighters are going to arrive on the scene in time.
The Secret Life of Fighter Command Page 24